You do not make fun of Taylor Swift's little booty on Twitter and get away with it, my friend. Not when Lorde's ancient spirit is also on Twitter.

The Twitter spat began yesterday, when Diplo—boyfriend of Katy Perry, the subject of Taylor Swift's bad blood anthem "Bad Blood"—tweeted that someone should make a Kickstarter to get Taylor Swift a booty:

Someone should make a kickstarter to get taylor swift a booty

— BABY DADDY (@diplo) November 12, 2014

Hmm. Maybe you should just do it yourself if you want it so bad, Diplo? Lazy. Of course, someone did it for Diplo almost instantly, ensuring that Diplo will never learn his lesson:

Get Taylor Swift A Booty https://t.co/RpkB8JExSV

— BABY DADDY (@diplo) November 12, 2014

The Fundly campaign to get Taylor Swift a booty asks for a mere $3,500, over a grand less than the average price of a butt augmentation. One has to assume the creator of the Fundly, Eric Spivak, was planning on Taylor Swift kicking in the difference. As of posting, the Fundly has raised $45.

Then Lorde—sweet old witch and friend of Taylor Swift, who is the enemy of Katy Perry, who is the girlfriend of Diplo—told Diplo to do something about his—almost certainly accurately—tiny penis:

@diplo should we do something about your tiny penis while we're at it hm

— Lorde (@lordemusic) November 13, 2014

The End

[ images via Getty]

Last week in Minneapolis, cops and a local news station accused Mayor Betsy Hodges of throwing up gang signs with a convicted criminal. She was actually posing with a campaign volunteer, and the "known gang sign" is known to most people as "pointing."

Now Jon Stewart has gotten hold of #Pointergate, and he can barely repeat the accusations against the mayor without laughing.

If pointing is a gang sign, Stephen Colbert and every human baby engaging in the most primal form of human communication must be dangerous criminals! Shocking!

Stewart eventually regained his composure and identified the real motivation behind Pointergate: Mayor Hodges has recently criticized cops and made reforming the police department part of her platform, so law enforcement fed the "scandalous" photo to a conservative-leaning local news station.

Good plan. No possible way it could backfire on you and make you a laughingstock in the national media. It certainly doesn't give the appearance of racism, either.

[h/t Mediaite]

I'm going to cut straight to the chase: Curt Schilling has no fucking clue what he's talking about. For the past 14 hours he has been sending out links to Geocities-looking websites and arguing with people about evolution on Twitter. Despite hundreds of people letting him know that he's wrong, Schilling continues to show his ass to the world.

Seriously, a seven-year-old with a rudimentary public school education is more informed about science than Curt Schilling. Below is a selection of the absolute dumbest tweets, but if you have a half hour and want to laugh/weep/hate read—or maybe all three at once—go check out his timeline, where he's still going strong as of this posting.

@fknIrked @IRaiseUFacts @CharlieRDaley Hey clown, why don't apes still evolve into humans if that was the path? Why doesn't ANY..

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) November 13, 2014

@fknIrked @IRaiseUFacts @CharlieRDaley creature evolve into another creature entirely, if we all came from one organism?

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) November 13, 2014

Settle in and listen to this world changing mind, he's eccentric and awesome, you have to rethink your world. https://t.co/Lf7FMjh00D

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) November 12, 2014

@rlbradley To bad it's been disproved about a thousand times. Every experiment to prove it has failed.

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) November 12, 2014

@MauryCompson @rlbradley It isn't. We didn't evolve from another creature, never happened and no one earth can prove that it did

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) November 12, 2014

@applextree You mean the facts behind creation?

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) November 12, 2014

@Bye_Dogma @wmdavid66 @idiocyalert @_Golden_Rule_ Here's where ya get stuck. I don't have to prove it, MANY MANY people saw it and wrote

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) November 13, 2014

@Bye_Dogma @wmdavid66 @idiocyalert @_Golden_Rule_ And in the 2000+ years since then NOT 1 SINGLE thing has ever been found that disproves..

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) November 13, 2014

@Bye_Dogma @wmdavid66 @idiocyalert @_Golden_Rule_ Far easier to believe every living organism on this planet came from 1 cell?? Really?

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) November 13, 2014

@SkepticalKnight Funny thing about that? Not one of those was invented, every one was discovered. They existed already, we just found them

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) November 13, 2014

Where are the fossils for all the 'MISSES" in your Evolution theory? Elephants bred elephants, and will for a thousand years right?

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) November 13, 2014

@CharlieRDaley Show me ONE fossil, ANWHERE in the world that is a "miss", a creature in between two creatures as it evolved? Doesn't exist.

— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) November 13, 2014

A sickening new report on the sex crimes unit of the New Orleans police department reveals that reports of sexual assaults and rape were routinely ignored by a group of detectives—including one detective who "did not believe that simple rape should be a crime."

If you'd like to read the entire New Orleans inspector general's report on how five detectives managed to utterly ignore hundreds and hundreds of serious sex crime reports, see here. If you would like a short version of the findings, this will give you some idea of how much damage a small handful of (Corrupt? Incompetent? Lazy?) police detectives can do to the social fabric of an entire city, and to people's lives:

• Of the 1,290 calls reviewed, 840 (65%) were designated as "miscellaneous" with no reports written. Of the remaining 450 calls (35%) that were designated as sex crimes, the five detectives followed their brief initial reports with supplemental reports only 40 percent of the time, producing just 179 supplemental reports during the three-year period.
• In 271 of the designated sex crime cases, no supplemental reports were produced documenting any investigative effort beyond the brief initial report.

The general findings are bad enough. Some of the specifics are worse. The report tells of detectives callously ignoring evidence of serious crimes, lying about sending in lab results, and acting in a way that is far more disgusting than a mere lack of professionalism. From the New York Times:

In one case, a 2-year-old was brought to the emergency room on suspicion of having been the victim of a sexual assault and was found to have a sexually transmitted disease. The detective did no follow-up and closed the case.

In another, a nurse collected DNA evidence from a victim in a rape kit, but the detective apparently never submitted the kit for testing. In a log book, the detective explained that the kit was never submitted "because the sex was consensual." That same detective, the report said, told at least three different people that he or she "did not believe that simple rape should be a crime."

Jesus.

[Photo: Flickr]

Twenty-five-year-old Jorge Peña rose to internet infamy this week after video of him slapping a woman on the F train last weekend was uploaded to YouTube. He was cleared of misdemeanor assault and disorderly conduct charges, but in a new interview with the New York Post, Peña defends...his jacket.

In the video, Danay Howard, 21, can be seen trash-talking Peña's jacket. "You got a wack 8-ball jacket that came out in 1990," Howard yells. "Get your money game up." This argument led to Howard hitting Peña with her purse, and Peña returning the favor with a smack to the face, setting off an all-out brawl inside the train car. "I never slapped anyone before. Especially a girl," Peña told the Post. "But when I saw that blood, I couldn't take it. She attacked me like a man."

But Peña is adamant that his jacket is "actually highly fashionable right now" because it was "worn by the rapper T.I. in a recent music video." Well then!

"I love this jacket," Peña told the tabloid. "But I don't think I can wear it anymore. People will just know me because of it and what happened."

A "social experiment" where a woman pretended to be drunk on Hollywood Boulevard while gross men blatantly tried to take advantage of her made the rounds earlier this week. As many suspected, the viral "prank" was entirely staged. The L.A. Weekly broke the story.

The stunt, posted by novice YouTube prankster and viral marketer Stephen Zhang, was intended to capitalize on the street harassment conversation that erupted around the infamous, endlessly-dissected New York City catcall video. It took the creepiness and danger to the next level, showing several men attempting to take home a drunk-seeming woman who asked for directions to the bus.

It worked. The video now has more than 7 million views on YouTube. But one of the men featured in it says the "drunk" woman wasn't the only one acting—all of the participants were playing roles, and they may have been tricked into doing it.

Mike Koshak, who plays the short guy in the fakest-seeming segment of the video, says he only agreed to be in it because he was told it was a student comedy short. "The video that has me in it that's going around the web was all staged and all of the people in it were acting," he wrote on Facebook.

"It's a false ass portrayal and I was lied to about what the video even was. Faulty ass shit."

The L.A. Weekly viewed a Facebook message from one of the video's creators, telling him "Yo dude, totally cool with you telling everyone that we came up to you and you acted the part for the video."

The Weekly reports Koshak is now considering legal action.

[h/t Daily Dot]

In 1880 industrialist George Pullman set out to build a capitalist utopia. The town of Pullman was established just outside of Chicago as a model community—a place that was supposed to produce both happy workers and a nice return for Pullman's investors. It turned out to be a miserable failure. And conditions in the town were so terrible that it was the catalyst for one of America's most famous strikes: the Pullman Strike of 1894.

Americans were told that the community of Pullman was both scientific and the visionary project of a lone genius. It was to be an ambitious experiment in transforming American society; and even though it borrowed heavily from the ideas of company towns already developed in England, it was to be a shining example of ingenuity for the entire industrialized world.

The idea was to build a city from scratch—a town with Pullman-owned factories, Pullman-owned shops, and Pullman-owned housing.

"Pullman is the only city in the world built scientifically and artistically in every part, and from a central idea within one man," Duane Doty, an engineer for Pullman, wrote in 1888.

The site of Pullman was ten miles south of the Chicago border at the time—not that far away, but far enough from the city to feel like its own community. For better, and certainly for worse.

At its peak the town would house about 12,000 people. And Pullman sunk over $6 million into the community in the first three years alone, building modern sewers, providing indoor plumbing, and planting over 30,000 trees and plants. But it would all prove a ridiculous folly awash in hubris and greed.

Pullman's empire on rails

George Pullman illustration circa 1860 via Getty; The Pullman mansion via Library of Congress

George Pullman had made his name in the railroads, delivering the first "Pullman Palace Car" to the world in the 1860s. The idea was to bring refinement in train travel to the middle class—a more civilized train experience that allowed one to travel in style, at four times the regular price. Pullman leased his cars (generically called sleeping cars by the 1880s) to the country's railroad companies. Slowly but surely they became a smashing success.

Pullman's utopian community was seen as a natural extension of that vision. If he could put some civility into train travel, why not inject some into his low paid workforce? Not to mention make a hefty profit from them in the process. Pullman's town was essentially one giant experiment in building the model employee, while making as much money from them as humanly possible.

"His interest in building a town was in trying to find a way to perfect capitalism," Dr. Jane Eva Baxter who has done extensive research on Pullman tells me over the phone from Chicago. "So he wanted to create a company town where everybody would be in conditions that would allow them to be content with their place in the capitalist system."

Pullman believed that the working class were little more than unrefined brutes. If he could just surround them with the finer things in life, he believed they would shed their odd, backward, immigrant ways.

"I want the people who work at Pullman to have the advantages of seeing the best," Pullman said. "I want no cheap, crude, inartistic work in any department. I have faith in the educational and refining influences of beauty and beautiful and harmonious surroundings, and hesitate at no reasonable expenditure to secure them."

But that beauty would come at a terrible price.

Throw in some social engineering

Row of worker's houses in Pullman circa 1890-1900 via Library of Congress

"The town would be profitable, and would pay money to investors," Baxter explains. "The workers would be given better living conditions than they were afforded in a typical urban settlement and through the working conditions they would be happy to be workers. And [Pullman's] idea was that you could create a visionary community where everybody could be happy with whatever they were doing to make the company go."

Everybody had their place in the new town of Pullman, and no one was to deviate from that place. Nor the strict rules laid out by the central planners.

"The Pullman vision includes some very deliberate social engineering," Baxter tells me. "Who you are in the factory system determines the type of home that you would be living in. And the community is laid out according to a plan where certain types of people are living in certain types of places in the community."

Pullman's managers lived in single family homes with their families. The white workers of Pullman lived in tidy rowhouses like the ones seen above. Workers weren't allowed to own their homes, but instead were forced to rent them. Despite the fact that Pullman was one of the country's largest employers of black Americans as sleeping car porters, no black people were allowed to live in Pullman.

Some white workers were sometimes allowed to live outside of the city limits, but it was made quite clear that those who lived inside Pullman were the preferred employees. If you didn't live in Pullman your job was never very secure at the factory. George Pullman himself didn't live in the community, but instead had a mansion in Chicago.

In Pullman's eyes, everything seemed to be just fine with this experiment in paternalistic capitalism. But things would go south pretty quickly after the workers actually moved in.

But no alcohol

Pullman library screenshot via the PBS documentary, Chicago: City of the Century

George Pullman was a Unitarian Universalist and a prohibitionist. The town had just one church which ostensibly could be rented by a congregation of any religion, but proved insufficient for his workforce which was comprised of many faiths.

The town had its own library, but again, though it looked like a fine thing to have from the outside, it didn't really serve the community. Few workers could afford the $3 membership fee—roughly $100 adjusted for inflation. But workers dared not to say anything negative about the arrangement. Aside from owning everything in town, Pullman employed spies to keep watch on everything residents did and said.

Pullman also forbade alcohol in the town, though there was one place it was served—the posh Hotel Florence (named after Pullman's daughter and pictured below) and a place where the average worker was not welcome. Out of town guests with enough money could imbibe as they pleased.

Hotel Florence circa 1890-1900 via Library of Congress

The town had a shopping center (known as an Arcade) that was the only game in town. Prices were inflated, despite promises of "lowest Chicago prices" on the banner below.

Interior of the Arcade circa 1882 via the 2012 paper The Paradox of Capitalist Utopia by Jane Eva Baxter

But the Arcade was no doubt impressive on paper. The complex had a 1,000-seat theater, a barbershop, doctor's offices, a U.S. post office, and a bank, along with its numerous overpriced shops and restaurants.

But what happens when you take away a worker's personal freedoms and gouge him left and right? He's going to inevitably resent the people pulling the strings. Pullman's working class were largely immigrants from European countries—people with traditions and ways of building a community that they wanted to replicate in some fashion in Pullman.

"So you take away the major way that these communities would've socialized in Europe, socialized in their neighborhoods here in the U.S. and you strip that away," Baxter tells me. "If you want to shop in Pullman you're shopping in a store that's not going to look like a store that you'd normally go to—it doesn't have products that you'd normally buy, you're not going to be able to have transactions in a language that maybe is easier for you. And all of these things add up."

Baxter is most interested in what came after Pullman was sold off. She's currently researching the ways in which urban working class communities were organized at the dawn of the 20th century. Communities drawn along ethnic and religious lines couldn't form in the same ways thanks to Pullman's restrictions on congregation and drinking. Europeans immigrants naturally resented the inability to form communities as they wished.

At least it's clean

Arcade Park and Greenstone Church scanned from the book The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labor Upheaval by Almont Lindsey (1943)

Boosters of the Pullman experiment pointed to a lower death rate in the town than both national and world averages. They pointed to the excellent sanitation as the reason and they were almost certainly right. But that cleanliness wasn't cheap. And if you were to suddenly exclude anyone who couldn't afford to live in Pullman, then of course the death rates most associated with disease contracted from poor sanitation would go down.

Park in Pullman circa 1890-1900 via Library of Congress

Pullman was a shining example of cleanliness—like the most brilliantly scrubbed toilet bowl the world had to offer.

If you're starting to wonder why so many of the photos of the city are completely devoid of people, there's a very simple explanation: Pullman forbade public gatherings not sanctioned by the Pullman Company. It may have been picturesque, with its ornamental lake and lush parks. But who could enjoy them with bans on any large gatherings?

Illustration of Pullman with map from the February 1885 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine scanned from the book Urban Disorder and the Shape of Disbelief by Carl Smith

Writing for Harper's in 1885 after a visit to Pullman, economist and author Richard T. Ely clearly tried to be diplomatic in his criticisms of the uber-capitalist experiment. But by the end of the piece he didn't mince words about just how creepy and un-democratic the entire setup really was:

In looking over all the facts of the case the conclusion is unavoidable that the idea of Pullman is un-American. It is a nearer approach than anything the writer has seen to what appears to be the ideal of the great German Chancellor. It is not the American ideal. It is benevolent, well wishing feudalism, which desires the happiness of the people, but in such way as shall please the authorities.

The American feudalism that Ely decried would fold under the weight of its first major test, less than a decade later.

Panic in Pullman (and everywhere else)

Workers at the main gate of the factory in 1891 via the Pullman Company Archives

In 1893 the American economy tanked after a financial panic. Chaos begat chaos as banks failed and the American economic system was revealed to have been a house built on sand. It would begin the worst economic Depression that the United States had ever seen until that point.

After the devastation of the 1893 market crash, Pullman laid off large numbers of workers. He gave preference to those living in the town of Pullman, but slashed wages. One thing he didn't slash? Rents. In fact, some workers (whose rents were often automatically deducted from their paychecks) found that they literally only had pennies left to live on after getting paid.

One local pastor reported on the paychecks of the workers after the 1893 crash:

One man has a paycheck in his possession of two cents after paying the rent. He has never cashed it, preferring to keep it as a memento... another I saw the other day for seven cents. It was dated September '93. The man had worked as a skilled mechanic for ten hours a day for twelve days and earned $9.07... His half-month's rent amounted to $9.00. The seven cents was his, but he never claimed it.

The situation was clearly unsustainable. Despite the fact that his company was worth roughly $62 million in 1893 (an astronomically larger amount when you adjust for inflation), George Pullman would not concede an inch in the town that bared his name. His greed would ultimately prove the town's undoing.

The deplorable financial condition of the workers in Pullman inspired cartoons like the one below.

It had all began with such lofty goals, with those who examined the town hanging their hats on the social theories of the day. Rational capitalism would win out, commentators assured the public.

"Here, indeed, seems to be the coming paradise of labor," one writer who had visited Pullman proudly wrote in a 1882 edition of The Railway Age Monthly. "If here are not all the conditions for a healthful and mutually beneficial relation between the great and powerful corporation that furnishes capital and employment, and those who seek and find employment, the best and most approved social theories are at fault."

Those social theories would at least have to be re-examined, then.

The Arcade and Lake Vista scanned from the book The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labor Upheaval by Almont Lindsey (1943)

"Capital will not invest in sentiment nor for sentimental considerations for the laboring classes," that same writer would opine. "But let it once be proved that enterprises of this kind are safe and profitable and we shall see great manufacturing corporations developing similar enterprises, and thus a new era will be introduced in the history of labor."

But after a rough and tumble decade this supposed paradise would become the epicenter of American labor's struggle against industry—a shining example of the failures of arrogant businessmen who believed they had found the utopian answer to America's labor problem. All because the bottom had fallen out, and nobody at the top was willing to accept a financial loss. This capitalist utopia was to be built on the backs of the working people. But they wouldn't take it for much longer.

The strike that ground the nation to a halt

National Guard troops surrounding Arcade Building via the Chicago History Museum

Officially, joining a labor union was against the law in the town of Pullman. But that didn't stop the workers who were fed up with their condition. In 1893 the Pullman Company had about 14,000 employees spread out across the United States. The town of Pullman itself (not exclusively employees) had about 12,600 residents.

On May 11, 1894, some 4,000 workers of Pullman's utopian community went on strike with the American Railway Union (ARU). In the coming weeks roughly 250,000 other laborers around the nation would join them. The strike caused both the Pullman company and the nation to grind to a halt.

Eugene V. Debs, a labor activist and then head of the ARU ordered Pullman cars unhooked and set aside. He also stopped the mail from running. Pullman hired strikebreakers to bust heads and intimidate the workers. But many, especially those living in the experimental city of Pullman, felt they no longer had anything left to lose. What were they working for if all of their pay was taken away for rent and they couldn't afford to feed their families? It wasn't long before the federal government stepped in. But, as you can imagine, it wasn't to help the workers.

On July 3, 1894 President Cleveland called out troops to Chicago and Pullman. You can see them above in front of the Arcade Building in Pullman. Within three days rioting would start in Chicago, with hundreds of train cars looted and set aflame. What had up until then remained a generally peaceful action (at least on the side of the workers) had turned incredibly violent.

Illustration of workers taking control of railcars in an 1894 issue of Harper's via the Library of Congress

When I ask Dr. Baxter about "the strike," referring of course to the Strike of 1894, she kindly reminds me that there were a number of strikes during Pullman's existence as a company town. Utopia this was not.

"The town of Pullman was built and gets up and running in 1880-81 and the first strike is in 1882. And there were many strikes long before this strike," Baxter tells me. "So one thing I encourage people to think about is that there never was a utopia in the first place."

As much as two-thirds of the country's rail transportation was affected by the 1894 strike. The mail stopped being delivered. Eugene V. Debs indeed made his name in Pullman and would eventually serve time in jail for conspiracy to obstruct the mail and refusal to shut down the strike. He would emerge from jail a socialist after having read Karl Marx, something he apparently never had time to do before getting locked up in Woodstock, Illinois.

If Pullman's capitalist utopian experiment had achieved anything, it was making a socialist out of what would become one of America's most famous labor activists.

"[Pullman] really wanted to create a place where there would be no need for a strike—that workers would be so content that you would never have labor unrest," Baxter tells me. "Well, labor unrest starts within a year [of the town's formation]. So the vision never really has any kind of traction."

"Unlike other utopias, people just wanted jobs. They're not necessarily buying into Pullman's vision. It's not a shared intentional community," Baxter says, reminding me of other failed utopias we've explored on Paleofuture like Upton Sinclair's Helicon Home Colony in New Jersey during the first decade of the 20th century, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City plan which would first emerge in the 1930s.

Whether socialist, capitalist, libertarian, or merely technocratic, everyone has to buy into one particular brand of utopia for it to even get off the ground. Anything else is simply a dictatorship.

"It's Pullman's idea and then a bunch of workers working for him. And trying to live in the context of this idea," Baxter explains, revealing the biggest flaw in the Pullman plan. Few people in Pullman felt like it was their own home, let alone an ideal they could get behind.

National Guard troops camped out in front of Hotel Florence via the Chicago History Museum

Over a dozen people were killed in the ensuing battles of 1894. By early August, with workers unable to afford more lost wages, labor leaders in jail, and troops showing no sign of weakness, the Pullman strike had collapsed. Many of the striking workers who belonged to unions were fired and any who lived in the capitalist utopian town of Pullman were thrown out on their asses. Their were no concessions by the company and they continued to pay the same abysmal wages while charging exorbitant rents. At least as long as the town stayed in Pullman Company hands.

More than $1 million in property had been destroyed in Chicago, but compared with the brutal battles there, ten miles to the north, the strikes in Pullman stayed relatively subdued. Above we see the National Guard camped out at the Florence Hotel.

After the strike was effectively crushed nationwide, President Cleveland commissioned a report to investigate its cause. The final report (which was incredibly long at over 1,000 pages) found that George Pullman and his utopian experiment to be both landlord and employer in some capitalist's paradise had been the match that lit a fire under the burgeoning American labor movement.

"The aesthetic features are admired by visitors, but have little money value to employees, especially when they lack bread," the report asserted about the town. Sure, Pullman had built a gorgeous little town. But even with all of its authoritarian rules aside, no worker actually wanted to live there if they couldn't provide the basics for their families.

Death and the demise of the company town

George Pullman screenshot via the PBS documentary, Chicago: City of the Century

The courts would ultimately rule that the Pullman experiment had to end. The town would slowly be sold off piece by piece over the next decade, becoming like any other working class Chicagoland suburb.

"The Illinois Supreme Court required Pullman to make a choice: They said you can own the company or you can own the town. You can't own both," Baxter tells me. "And he of course chose the Pullman Palace Car Company and kept the manufacturing business and had to sell off the town. And as soon as workers were able to purchase homes the whole thing ends and the community changes."

George Pullman died on October 19, 1897. He was so despised his family became worried that his workers might dig him up. To make sure that no one would desecrate his remains, Pullman was buried much deeper than usual, encased in thick concrete and under large railroad ties. The burial reportedly took two full days.

Upon learning of the rather elaborate burial procedure, journalist Ambrose Bierce was said to remark, "It is clear the family in their bereavement was making sure the sonofabitch wasn't going to get up and come back."

Pullman—both the man and the town—was unable to deliver a capitalist utopia. At least for his workers. Because with his investors making a guaranteed 3 percent on the town, even in the worst of times, his capitalist utopia certainly seemed to work just fine for those with the capital.

But you can only screw people over for so long before they start asking for their own utopia. Or at the very least, a wage to live on.

Secondary sources: Building the Workingman's Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns by Margaret Crawford (1995); The Company Town by Hardy Green (2010); On Pullman, Illinois by Duane Doty; The Paradox of Capitalist Utopia: Visionary Ideals and Lived Experience in the Pullman Community 1880-1900 by Jane Eva Baxter; Pullman, Illinois: Changes in community planning from the 1880s to the 1990s by Ted Newcomen (1998); The Infamous Pullman Strike As Revealed by the Robert Todd Lincoln Collection by John R. Chapin (1981); The Pullman Strike of 1894: A Crippling Blow to Organized Labor by Viveca W.S. Morris (2011)

Everyone wants Taylor Swift on their magazine cover this week. Everyone needs Taylor Swift on their magazine cover this week. But whose Taylor Swift magazine cover best gets at the essence of the Taylor Swift phenomenon? Who wins the Taylor Swift cover sweepstakes and two tickets to Subway (sponsored by Diet Coke and iHeart Radio)?

Time magazine

Here's Taylor Swift photographed straight-on and point-blank by Martin Schoeller, in his signature style—familiar yet slightly distorted, up close yet detached and impersonal. This is how we apprehend our world leaders and other historic icons.

Bloomberg Businessweek

Taylor Swift's face expands to consume the entire frame of the magazine cover. Her eyelashes are starbursts; her red lipstick is the red "IS" of the cover line (Ehyeh asher ehyeh) and also the red of the the magazine banner. Taylor Swift is Bloomberg Businessweek yet is also larger than Bloomberg Businessweek.

Wonderland magazine

A departure from the usual representational protocol: in place of the familiar schematic palette of blue eyes/red lips/flaxen hair/porcelain skin, here is a tanned and "natural" Taylor Swift: hair darkened as if washed and not yet dried, brows thickened over eyes that almost but not quite assume a quizzical or searching attitude. But not quite. Her gaze is still, ultimately, impervious. You are the one looking quizzical. Who is this newcomer? You do know. You always have known.

Paper magazine

BTW, this is our new cover. cc @KimKardashian http://t.co/wfBvNeCewt pic.twitter.com/bVyC1nJDND

— PAPER Magazine (@papermagazine) November 12, 2014

Paper goes even further than Wonderland. Here is a side of Taylor Swift that readers have rarely seen—exuberant, bursting out of the constraints of her usual image, almost brunette. The famliar gangly collectible doll has become the Venus of Willendorf. It's a near-shocking revelation, but in the end, all that's revealed is Taylor Swift.

New York magazine

Now we return to the essence of Taylor Swift as the mind's eye knows her best. The white, the red, the kinetic energy. A veiled allusion to the Swift Company, the slaughter and dismemberment leading into a chain of product that ties America together, nourishing and sustaining us all. Ladies and gentlemen, Taylor Swift.

Winner: New York magazine

A new Homeland Security report cites nearly a dozen "factors" that allowed intruder Omar Jose Gonzalez to break into the White House this September, ranging from malfunctioning radios to a mistaken belief by Secret Service agents that White House bushes "were an impassable barrier."

An official summary of the report, published by The Washington Post Thursday night, begins by outlining the Secret Service's failures to act on pre-incident intelligence, starting with a July search of Gonzalez's car that turned up eleven firearms and "a map of Washington D.C. with the White House and two other sites highlighted."

The document goes on to detail an impressive series of blunders made by White House security on the day of the incident, including:

• An agent who took out his earpiece to make a personal call at the time of the intrusion.
• An erroneous belief that doors within the White House were locked.
• A number of officers threatening Gonzalez with deadly force and then failing to fire when he ignored their commands to stop.

In October, Secret Service Director Julia Pierson resigned from her position after an 18-month tenure characterizing chiefly by its impressive number of a complete fuck-ups.

[Image via AP Images]

According to the Associated Press, jihadi godfathers Al Qaeda and scrappy terror upstarts ISIS have decided to put aside their petty differences and focus on what's really important: making life worse for everyone else.

The two groups have been negotiating local truces since October, but a new agreement reached this month could have ISIS and Al Qaeda coordinating attacks on their mutual enemies.

From the AP:

According to a Syrian opposition official speaking in Turkey, the meeting took place Nov. 2 in the town of Atareb, west of Aleppo, starting at around midnight and lasting until 4 a.m. The official said the meeting was closely followed by members of his movement, and he is certain that an agreement was reached.

Luckily for anyone fearing a 2014 ISIS/Al Qaeda reunion tour, the new pact reportedly "stops short of a merger between the two."

[Image via AP Images]

In a perfect world, pets would only indulge in weird pet behavior up until the point it stops being cute and starts being annoying. Of course, we don't live in a perfect world, we live in one that's ruled by passions—those of men and paper-flicking cats alike.

Sometimes that means pawing the same sheet of paper over and over again, even if you don't know why you're doing it, even if people want you to stop. Sometimes a thing just needs to be done.

So flick on, gentle Paper Cat. Ignore all the critics and follow your flick-loving heart.

[h/t Reddit]

Police arrested a New Jersey man this week for allegedly hitting a 61-year-old pedestrian with his car and driving 1.5 miles with the victim "halfway through the vehicle's windshield."

Vocativ reports 33-year-old Marcos Ortega was charged with leaving the scene of a motor vehicle crash and causing serious bodily injury to another on Monday after he passed a police officer "with what looked to be a body on the front of his car" and was immediately pulled over.

Fire department and first aid personnel were then called to extract the victim from Ortega's windshield, who was flown to Jersey Shore University Medical Center with serious injuries.

According to the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office, a field sobriety test determined Ortega to be "impaired."

[Image via Ocean County Prosecutor's Office]

More and more details about Here Comes Honey Boo Boo matriarch Mama June Shannon's past continue to be unearthed as the mother draws ire for her reported involvement with the convicted sex offender who allegedly molested her daughter. TMZ reports Mama June was prosecuted in 2009 for not paying years of child support for that daughter, Anna "Chickadee" Cardwell.

Mama June's mother, Sandra Hale, was given guardianship of Anna in 2003, a year after she was allegedly molested by McDaniel. According to court documents obtained by TMZ, Mama June was required to pay $100 a month in child support under this guardianship arrangement, but apparently didn't pay for years, owing $4,144.62 in child support by 2009.

The Henry County District Attorney filed criminal contempt charges, and apparently Mama June faced jail time; the court dismissed the charges three months later.

[Image via Getty]

Not until Monday night did it occur to me how badly I wanted to own a shirt that said SAVOR THE FLAVOR. On a free-standing garment rack, wedged between an apron, a black vinyl puffer vest, and several other shirts of sartorial insignificance, there was a bright-red women's v-neck t-shirt demanding that I put a premium on taste.

"SAVOR THE FLAVOR," it said to me loudly, in white block lettering.

OK, I thought. I was in an open-plan loft space in the Garment District whose walls were white and chrome and in front of me there was a long white banquet table topped with a spread of untouched congealing pizzas that, on preliminary glance, could have either been real or plastic. Bring on the flavors. Please make sure there are many flavors to savor. Do not skimp on these flavors, for that is what I have come for.

Though I've never been to an engagement party, a nightclub, a pop album launch, nor any event that could be considered even slightly exclusive or VIP, I believe that the Pizza Hut Flavor of Now event, which I attended and where I was fêted by several exceedingly nice women of average height, was a successful example of an engagement-meets-album-launch hoo-hoorah. The engagement was between new flavors and old pizza, and the album launch was for a new pop-R&B group called Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut was trying on its skinny jeans and chain wallet for the first time.

Earlier that day, Pizza Hut had announced that their previously foolproof business plan—make pizza, then sell that shit and fast—was getting re-conceived. In a company-wide rebrand that spans from their pizza box design to their nutrition to their ingredients to their ordering style, Pizza Hut revealed that the near 60-year-old franchise was going to be new(ish), like Oops!... I Did It Again era Britney Spears in some red latex and a hair poof. This newness included "ten new crust flavors, five new premium ingredients, four new flavor-packed drizzles, and new Skinny Slice pizzas," which at the event would result in eleven new pizza recipes for the taking, eating, and digesting with difficulty.

In a courageous act of unparalleled bravery, I volunteered to travel beyond 8th Avenue and above 14th Street to see what was in the kitchen and what was really going on beneath the hut.

Being balls deep in pizza is not an uncommon situation for a person like me. I looked out wistfully at the beautiful view of the New York City skyline, glowing like an oil painting from the window of the chic nightclub-esque room. Then I turned back around to face five tables loaded with oily pizza. This pieline view featured not skyscrapers but dried-out toppings claiming the air rights over gummy mozzarella.

Several servers wearing black latex gloves that could easily pass for leather Isotoners began bringing out pizzas from god knows where, a fire escape? A pizza dungeon? A backyard birthday party? A rave?

But . . . isn't there already pizza out here? I thought, one hand still tugging at the hem of the SAVOR THE FLAVOR t-shirt. There was one long table fit for a queen and her several jesters and manservants, packed with pies. "Hot pizzas are almost ready," one of the many friendly women told me. So this other array of pizza was the pizza I could not and should not eat. Got it.

In the meantime, I grabbed a cheese stick and a fancy white plate, which I loaded up with "flavor-packed drizzles," spooned out of a series of white ceramic bowls in four flavors: balsamic, honey sriracha, barbecue, and buffalo. The new Pizza Hut plans to drizzle your requested drizzles on your pizza before delivering it. "People love garnishes," Pizza Hut chef Barbie King would tell me.

In a color palette reminiscent of a late fall sunset, my drizzles looked artistic and appetizing. The appetizing effect lasted until I tasted them, dipping a dry cheese stick into each gooey dollop individually.

Another of the nice woman approached. "So! What do you think?" she asked. My was mouth full with brittle bread and sweet slime. I swallowed a crumbly bite and replied that they were great. I wrote in my notebook that "the drizzles taste like high fructose corn syrup with even more sugar."

Here's is where we take a break for storytime. The last Pizza Hut I went to was in Chittagong, Bangladesh, in 2011. Before that, I hadn't been to a Pizza Hut since I was a kid, probably sixth grade, at a Pizza Hut on Baltimore Pike in Springfield, Pa. In the years in between those two events, I had eaten a lot of pizza, probably more than any one normal human should.

Though my palate has changed drastically over the course of the Great Pizza Hut Gap of My Life, both visits to the American pizza chain—in sixth grade and adulthood, on two different continents—yielded pizza that tasted exactly the fucking same.

This is the purpose of major dining franchises that stake territories in suburbs throughout the country and across the world. Consistency—when families are too harried to make dinner or when a kid has 18 friends attending his birthday party or when pizza is the unanimous symbol of "It's time to party!"—is easily the greatest asset these businesses have.

Does that change the fact that their food, without question, tastes really, really terrible and that it is unilaterally bad for you? No.

Yet we eat it anyway.

I tasted nine slices of Pizza Hut's new pizza and by the time I was ready to leave, I felt dazed and bloated. The slices were portioned out to me and several other writers (almost all women) at the tasting event in thin slivers, a blessing. Initially I had believed I would have to eat several whole slices of Pizza Hut and I quaked with fear.

There were eleven types of pizza to taste, representing a tiny fraction of the "over two billion potential combinations" that Barbie King told me were possible under the new regime of options, a fact to which I responded with a face aghast. I'm not a math genius, but that seems like way too many.

I sampled and munched on the following "pre-selected" combinations (annotated with my observations from a grease-stained notebook):

Sweet Sriracha Dynamite – "sticky?"
Old Fashioned Meatbrawl – "fluffy crust; tastes like a pizza bolognese"
Skinny Club – "greasy and cheesy"
Plain Cheese Pizza with a Pretzel Crust – "why is this pizza so salty"
Cock-A-Doodle Bacon – "help help; bacony + cheesy + chickeny"
Pretzel Piggy – "full of sugar and acrid cheese"
Giddy Up BBQ Chicken – "sweet"
Cherry Pepper Bombshell – no notes
Skinny Italy – no notes

By the time I made it to the Cherry Pepper Bombshell and the Skinny Italy, I was in no state to be eating pizza or using my hands for any act except swiping my Metrocard to go home to my toilet. Each pizza felt like a culinary exquisite corpse: pretzel crust + mushrooms + blanched cheese + balsamic drizzle + fresh spinach = a one-way ticket to Flavor Town, which is a ghost town where no one lives because it is frightening and full of wraiths made of stale dairy products.

The only person maniacal enough to eat like I did on Monday night is Guy Fieri, a legendary figure in the twilight age of shoving a bunch of edible shit into one inedible meal. Digging into a slice of pizza so thoroughly drenched in honey and Sriracha that it was sticky to the touch, I wondered if Guy Fieri had some uncredited role in this insanity. Guy Fieri would make a great Oz.

Despite what Pizza Hut would like you to believe, the Flavor of Now is never going to be the same grab-bag flavors your cousin mixed into a milkshake before forcing you to drink it on a dare. Pizza, as we learned in the ingenious development of the two-flavor-option Pizza Push app, is a dish best served with simplicity, not with barbecue sauce and Ginger Boom Boom crust (this is real!!!!!!), or Peruvian Cherry Peppers, or whatever twisted mouth-assault one person can dream up.

Standing by a table brazenly advertising the Pretzel Piggy pizza and its inbred half-sister the Giddy Up BBQ Chicken, another writer I was talking to remarked, "This is the hangover table." I thought back to the last time I drank and the breakfast burrito that followed the morning after, made with black beans, eggs, salsa, and rice. No sane person, with the definitive exception of Guy Fieri, would drink again if the Flavor of Now were the only food left on earth to cure a hangover.

[Photos by Dayna Evans]

Three-year-old Gracie Lynn was eating breakfast with her parents at a Bob Evans in Evansville, Ind. this week when she noticed a man dressed as Santa Claus sitting alone in a booth. Not one to leave the bringer of presents to eat alone, she simply walked over and sat down across from him. Her mother told WFIE that the two talked "like they'd known each other for years." What does this little girl know? And was that the real Santa Claus?

Gracie Lynn apparently had two requests for the man in red: 1) That she forsake the doldrums of rural Indiana for the wild living and sparkling wonder of the North Pole with Mr. and Mrs. Claus. 2) No presents, but if he could, have her baby brother James be born. (Her mother's due date is in three weeks.)

WFIE—and this is weird—"tracked Santa down"....to a shopping mall, where he told a reporter that "he's going to have a few surprises for her this year." Just throwing up ideas here, but Gracie Lynn of Evansville, Ind. and Santa Claus might be co-conspirators in a plot to hoard presents.

[Video via WFIE]

Bill Gross, the head of bond firm Pimco, was paid $290 million last year—and then got fired this year! Everybody knows that the financial world is the purest example of pay accruing to winners solely by merit.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop, the Kevin James vehicle (a Segway, specifically) you bring up frequently as shorthand for unwatchable movies, is getting a sequel. Why? Because America demanded it. Seriously.

As Slashfilm explains, the original Paul Blart completely tanked overseas, but it did nearly $150 million in domestic box office. 2009 was a special time when America was eating up Kevin James, and Kevin James was eating up America.

So, despite the increasing importance of international audiences, and the fact that indoor malls are less culturally relevant than they've ever been, here is the trailer for Blart 2, unleashed upon a partially unsuspecting, partially ticket buying populous.

Paul Blart is kind of like wiping your ass. Half of us sit, half of us stand, and all of us assume everyone else does it the same way. You probably know a Blart fan (or several) and don't even realize it. They're apparently living among us in huge numbers.

For what it's worth, the writers seem to have gotten around the whole "mall" thing by going with a kind of Die Hard-meets-Ocean's Eleven-with-Segways pastiche, set in Vegas. Half of you will be very excited about this.

[h/t Slashfilm]

Well-moisturized Republican David Brooks fancies himself a bit of a social scientist. Not really in the sense of like, doing science. More in the sense of "knowing some guys."

David Brooks' column today, which is published in the worlds most influential newspaper, is about, uh... well, he starts out talking about George Eliot's love life, which he uses as a, uh, pretty bad example, honestly, of people asserting "agency" over their own lives, and then—presumably upon realizing that that example is so unconvincing—he starts rolling out the real scientific evidence.

I know an army officer who had a terrible commanding officer who only offered him negative feedback. He worked under this guy for 18 months, and whatever he did the feedback was the same. He had to come up with his own criteria to determine if he was doing well or poorly. He had to make decisions regardless of external affirmation or criticism. He discovered agency because external support was gone.

Oh?

I once knew a guy who was batted about by people who should have supported him. For a time he took it, reacting painfully to each abuse. But finally he just got fed up. In a moment of indignation he lashed out. Every human soul is entitled to dignity and respect. He tasted agency in a flash of anger and an instant of revolt.

Hmm.

I once read about a guy whose childhood was a steady calamity. He was afraid, unable to control his mind and self. But he became a writer and discovered he was magnificent at it. Through the act of writing, he could investigate his fears and demystify them. He discovered agency by finding something he was good at and organizing his life around that gift.

I see.

As we have learned today, David Brooks knows or has read about at least three guys.

[Photo: Getty]

I have always had a talent for growing ample facial hair, from the time I was in elementary school—when my mother would trim my neck hair before I hopped on the school bus—to my initiation into young Jewish adulthood at my Bar Mitzvah, at which my newly formed mustache made its entrance into the world with a growing pattern similar to a Chia Pet. My facial hair has paved the way to some of my most critical moments in my life, including my recent experience of playing a Palestinian terrorist on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in the controversial opera The Death of Klinghoffer.

Klinghoffer, which tells the story of the 1985 terrorist hijacking of the cruise liner the Achille Lauro and the death of Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound New York Jew on vacation with friends on the ship, has gained infamy for its subject matter, attracting scores of picketers claiming it the show is either anti-Semitic and anti-Palestine. On opening night, the opera attracted a crowd of 500 protestors charged with a mission to disrupt the evening's performance.

For me, the sight of all those protestors outside of the Met was frightening, empowering, and humbling. I don't aim to impose my limited understanding of global conflict on anyone—I'm a dancer—but I recognize that the nature of warfare naturally creates division and our relationships to whatever allegiance is cultivated by your upbringing and your willingness to challenge and educate yourself on matters. This opera has provided me the opportunity to see both sides of a conflict that, for the majority of my life, I hadn't seen.

My involvement in this opera began over two years ago when I was living in London. I had just graduated college and was at the start of my professional dance career when I saw a notice for an audition for an opera seeking darker-skinned Israeli looking men. Proud to consider myself ethnically ambiguous, I reached out to the ad with an image of myself attached and was invited to audition.

At the time, I was sporting the heftiest beard I've grown to date, thanks to my involvement in the film Anna Karenina, in which I paraded around with a six-inch beard to resemble a 19th-century Russian elite (ethnic ambiguity strikes again). As the audition for Klinghoffer progressed, it was clear that the creative team saw something in me beyond my beard, and I was cast as the young, naive terrorist named Omar, the man who kills Leon Klinghoffer. I originated the role at the English National Opera, and then I was invited to come reprise the role at The Met.

It was an interesting honor to be given such a meaty role, especially as a dancer. Dancers don't often get recognized in the opera scene. But I must admit it was a strange phone call to my parents (not opera fans) to let them know I had gotten a leading role in a controversial contemporary opera playing the part of a Palestinian terrorist. As a liberal Jew from the northern suburbs of Chicago, I never imagined those words would come out of my mouth. I also realized I knew very little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In order to preserve my humble naivety, I entered the rehearsal process seeking to gather as much information as I could.

Rehearsals for this opera were the most educational and interesting creative processes I have ever been a part of. The director, Tom Morris, assigned the cast homework, designating research topics for us to present upon. The topics included the 1948 war, the Yom Kippur war, the Gulf war, the Kinghoffers, the friends of the Klinghoffers aboard the ship, the terrorists aboard the ship, the crew on board, the Palestine Liberation Front and Palestine Liberation Organization.

We read books such as Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore, Palestine by Joe Sacco, The History of the Jews by Paul Johnson, and The Achille Lauro Hijacking by Micahel K. Bohn. Since I was playing a role of a terrorist, I was asked to research martyrdom and to look up notable individuals who were martyrs. Not only were we feeding ourselves tons of information and history concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but we were viewing the subject matter from as many angles as we could. As there are not two sides to Israel-Palestine, there are not two sides to Klinghoffer.

One of the biggest arguments protestors have against Klinghoffer is that it humanizes terrorists. But terrorists are human. I wanted to present Omar as a multi-dimensional young man who is dedicated to a life's mission, yet in the moment of fulfilling that quest, he ultimately questions his actions and finds himself in moral dilemma—should he kill Klinghoffer or no?

It can be difficult to communicate such complexities in an opera when you do not sing, but in my interpretation, Omar struggles with the emotional weight of his actions, and of committing the most severe act of violence one can. When it came to psychologically inserting myself into the role where I'm holding a pistol behind a man's head in front of 4,000 audience members, I had to identify with a mindset that was seriously foreign to me. In order for me to gain access to that frame of mind, it ultimately came down to the last five minutes I had to myself before going on stage. That's when I put my AK-47 around my neck. I felt its weight, its power, and its significance, and I begin to convince myself that everything I did from that point on was for a higher cause.

Of course, there's no way for me to fully inhabit the brain of a terrorist, but attempting to understand Omar has been challenging and illuminating. In order to commit to a life of martyrdom one must believe in something so much that there is no other option. There's a sincere sense of absolutism.

Amusingly, I don't really have any extreme beliefs—I'm a millennial, after all, and I carry myself with a relative mixture of apathy and realism. When it comes to religion, I'm more of a spectator than an engager. At this point in my life, I hold nothing in my heart that can be interpreted as a life's mission. So, for me, it was strange to play a role where I had to believe in something. The silver lining of playing a terrorist: it has inspired me to trust my neutral millennial mindset until I educate myself on all perspectives surrounding a conflict.

Beyond that, I feel fortunate to have been a part of something so significant. Klinghoffer feels alive, and more relevant than ever. How often does opera resonate on a global scale? It's been an amazing experience. This coming from a slightly apathetic, ethnically ambiguous, culturally-identifying Jew who can grow wickedly solid facial hair.

The Death of Klinghoffer closes Saturday.

Jesse Kovarsky is from Chicago and graduated from Skidmore College studying Dance and Art History. He was a member of Transitions Dance Company where he received his Masters in Performance from Laban Conservatory Music and Dance. He has spent the past four years in London performing for several choreographers and companies and appeared in two major motion pictures. The past two years he has been working with the physical theatre company Punch Drunk. He is currently performing in their production of Sleep No More here in NYC.

[Image by Tara Jacoby]

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